How to Drake It in America

It begins at three in the afternoon—the pool party—about an hour after Drake wakes in his manse in the San Fernando Valley. Another brightly scrubbed California day, and Drake's crew—the guys from Toronto who live with him here—are downright joyous. It's been a stretch of hard work, and everyone's eager to blow it up a little. Suddenly, bikinied women seem to materialize from thin air, as if competing in a rap beauty pageant. Some are super chatty, some aloof; some are full-bodied, some as wispy as a tamarack. A number swan about as if in a museum or a music video, firing their iPhone cameras, while others take dramatic, slow-motion strolls by the pool, as if this all will soon be theirs.

Drake's home is its own fantasia, a single-level ranch that sprawls in various wings over 7,500 square feet, from the game room to the gym to Drake's master bedroom with Jacuzzi. The pool is like a scene out of Waterworld, with a bar inside a grotto, waterfalls, and a slide that drops thirty feet through the rock. Someone leaps from the top of the waterfall into the pool while another holds on to the cliff and does pull-ups. Hung everywhere, the indoor-outdoor flat-screen TVs shine like mirrors. On the property are stables, a mechanical bull, and a movie theater. There's an air-conditioned doghouse and a wine cellar. Drake bought the place for $7.7 million from a restaurant-chain mogul who threw in all the furniture, too. When the front gate opens to allow passage, a woman's voice coos, "Access granted." Drake's boys call it Disneyland.

When not on the road, Drake splits time between here and Toronto—where he grew up and his mother still resides—surrounded by his boys, a rotating collection of about a dozen. At the kitchen island right now, a coterie of flirty women chat with Chubbs and Spoon, CJ and 40 (Drake's musical collaborator, Noah "40" Shebib, who makes the beats and mis all the songs). Drake finds me taking in the scene. "This ain't every day," he says. "I really don't live some crazy rapper life."

I kind of believe him. Beneath the banter and joviality—beneath Drake's thousand-watt smile—one almost immediately senses a moodier seriousness, a grown-up intention, though he admits, "Today I want my boys to have their fun." Still, with the weeks counting down to a (supposed) August release for his new album, Nothing Was the Same, and a tour scheduled to follow, the pressure has ratcheted up another notch, the crew have cinched a little tighter around their leader, and Drake is trying to shield himself from all the distractions, in order to prove himself once again.

This time—three albums in, at the age of 26—the stakes seem highest of all, because Drake wants the crown. Album sales, critical acclaim, street cred. If unintentional, his timing is uncanny, because both Kanye West and Jay-Z have new albums coming out just before his, which means this summer will say a lot about the current state of rap. There's Kanye, the trailblazer, who's churned out some of the genre's most radio-ready hits this past decade. But on his new album, Yeezus, he's gone dark and aggressive and chosen not to release an official radio single. Then there's Jay-Z, who morphs a certain street hustler's cool and indifference into CEO extravagance. But for all his prominence, Jay-Z hasn't written a lot of crossover hits. Which leaves Drake, who's staked out an interior space all his own, willing to rap and sing (he gets a lot of attention for doing both) about love and desire, loneliness and isolation. At the moment, Drake is also, unquestionably, the most radio-friendly—his voice has been a constant presence on the airwaves in recent years, on his own hits and those he's gifted to other artists. It's wildly competitive; they each want to be number one. And—here's the crazy part—Drake is the favorite.

This is Drake's constant quest, to search out that emotional connection, even in a crowd of 18,000. That's both his power and, according to his Internet parodists and haters, his Achilles' heel: his willingness to show emotion, to write revealing, autobiographical lyrics, and on occasion, between the rapper tropes of bravado and materialism, to demonstrate a flash of moral conscience in a game of misogynistic excess. And for his trouble, he's been called a "counterfeit rapper" (Ludacris), "a fuckin' piece of shit" (DMX), and "a straight pussy" (Lil' Kim), and cajoled to "come out the closet" (Chris Brown). Common rapped: You so black and white, trying to live a nigga's life... / You ain't wet nobody, nigga, you Canada dry. And that's coming from Common.

"You notice they don't criticize the music itself, though," says Drake about his detractors. "I'm okay with that."

Right now, Drake says, he feels like a bor in training before the main event. "You know the way fighters don't fuck before the fight?" he says. "Sometimes I feel like I'm so focused on training my body and getting my mind right to create this album that sex isn't one of my main priorities. If someone is around that I know and trust, I'm down. But I'm not going to end up with some stranger at this party."

Even as the house fills with half-naked ladies, Drake remains off to the side, observing—in the TV room or up in the studio, what he calls the Safari Room, for its painting of a lion on the wall—puffing on his hookah, worrying with 40 over every little mix and mumble and what its final effect will be. He's putting music "in the box," he says, in his computer here in the Safari Room, where the tracks remain a secret as yet. Sometimes he'll pull out his BlackBerry and start thumb-typing, not a text but some new lyric he's heard in his head. He collects the fragments by day and stitches them together at night.

Outside, the pool party is thumping as the sky darkens, Future and Kendrick Lamar on the stereo, several stacks of pizza bos, drinks galore. Drake hangs around the edges of his own party but eventually moves through the crowd like Gatsby, saying his hellos, chilling, laughing, like anyone his age.

A little while later, though, he's huddled with 40 on the steps outside the Safari Room, both of them nodding their heads, going over something intensely. The party is climbing to that point where all responsibility will soon be abdicated. The music blares. Some dude puffs his chest and dives again from the top of the waterfall. Without announcing it, Drake disappears back to the studio. He's felt something and wants to get it down, in hopes you'll feel it, too.

···

We're driving now in Drake's white Bentley, with Spoon, his head of security, following in an Escalade, headed toward a nearby Mexican joint. Ever since Drake got robbed four years ago while on a date—and because the game is a daily Kabuki of these rapper threats and counterthreats—every little movement requires security. Spoon is a mountain of a man, with an easy smile. Earlier, he laid out a scenario to illustrate what it's like each time Drake steps out, especially at night.

"Imagine you and I are in the club," Spoon said, "and we meet some ladies. I spend $1,000 on a bottle of Ace of Spades champagne, and then you buy the next one. We're 2,000 into it, been having great conversation for an hour, and it's, like, Hey, ladies, would you like to go back to the SLS and take it from there? And then Drake walks in. These girls are like over the rope—all over him, man—and here we are, sitting there with our dicks hard. Drake didn't do nothing. He just walked in, but now you and I have a beef with him, and he just wants a drink. And we're not the only ones. There are a dozen, two dozen just like us. And that's every night when we go to the club. You have no idea where it's going to come from."

Drake's most infamous night out occurred last June, at W.i.P. nightclub in New York City. Various versions of the story have emerged, with bottles being sent between Chris Brown's and Drake's respective tables, or sent back, or sent back with a note from Drake to Chris Brown that read "I'm fucking the love of your life," or no bottles and no note—who knows?—but just a lot of tension about Drake and Rihanna getting cozy after Brown assaulted her. What clearly transpired at the club was a melee, flying bottles and fists. The place was trashed. Brown's bodyguard showed up on TMZ with a nasty forehead gash, Brown tweeted out his own chin job, and hoopster Tony Parker, who happened to be at the club, sustained a scratched retina.

At the Mexican place, we sit at a table on the outdoor patio, listening to a man with an acoustic guitar really beat up some easy-listening tunes. It's not Drake's first time here. In fact our waitress acts a bit chilly at first, taking Drake's order for a strawberry margarita, and when she leaves, he says, "Oh man, I kinda dated her cousin, and I think she might be mad at me." Other tables steal the occasional glance, and someone from the staff comes by and says, "I don't want to interrupt, man, but you are badass!"

"Thank you," says Drake politely, and when the guy disappears back to the kitchen, he says, "I hope he means that the good way."

Then, drink in hand, he addresses his feud with Chris Brown. "I hear he has everything he could want now," Drake says, alluding to the fact that Brown and Rihanna were, for the moment, back together. "I don't want my name to be synonymous with that guy's name. I really don't. I wish we could sit down, just like you and me are right now, and talk it out man-to-man. But that's not going to happen. I'm not confrontational, but if someone challenges, I'm not going to back down."

Still, none of it sits too well with Drake. "It's embarrassing, the amount of media coverage," he says. "Two rappers fighting over the woman. He's not even a rapper, but still, it's the last way you want your name out there. It distracts from the music. But he's made me the enemy, and that's the way it's gonna stay, I guess."

When I say he seems somewhat Zen about it now—after all the back-and-forth between them this past year, trading barbs on radio shows or blasting them out in song lyrics—he says, "If I think about it too much, I feel it wrapping around my foot, like I get a feeling it could end really badly."

I can't tell if he's worried for Rihanna's safety, whom he won't mention by name. Or about the lengths to which he thinks Brown might go to perpetuate the feud.

When I ask what he means exactly, he says, "Like, it gets really dark."

Then, in rare silence, he won't say more.

The pleasure of hanging with Drake is that there isn't a question he won't try to answer, openly and honestly, shifting easily and unselfconsciously between talk of the rap game, money, family, and love.

"I had lunch the other day with someone I extremely look up to," he continues. "Okay—I had lunch with Will Smith, and listening to him talk, it made me think I don't know what love is. He said something profound. He said love is when you become one and you need that person. It's not about wanting anymore, you need that person. Hearing that, I don't know if I've ever felt that way. I've held women in very high regard almost to the point where I felt like I needed them for a very long time, but I don't know if I comprehend it yet, and I'm okay with that.

"I've made a lot of music about love being the only thing I'm missing. I think this is the first album I've made saying, I'm okay. I'm enjoying it right now. Maybe this is my time to grind it out, make a run for it and add some memories with my boys.

"But listen," he continues. "If I wasn't doing this, man, and I was back home in Toronto, and I had my job that kept me in the city, my girl would be my life. I have a lot of friends back there, and their relationships have become the focal point, the high point of their lives. And that's cool. I just have new goals, new places to go, new people to meet. I live off a different high point every day."

···

For a rapper as well-known as Drake, there remains an essential element of mystery about him. For one so open, there's a distance, and he prefers it that way. But then there's something beneath the exterior that reveals itself with urgency in conversation: Drake's raw ambition.

In the video for "Started from the Bottom," a song from the new album he posted on his blog over Super Bowl weekend, Drake is shown—among the requisite amount of rapper posturing, thick smoke, and bikinied ass-shaking—dancing with gold bars. The song has become almost more anthemic as the months have passed, not just because of its contagious riff but also because the lyrics capture something both aspirational and relatable while shining a light on the storyteller, Drake, who, sheared of his old curls, shines with a harder edge now. (Boys tell stories 'bout the man, runs one lyric. Say I never struggled, wasn't hungry, yeah, I doubt it, nigga.)

"By no means will I take a water break," he tells me. "I feel guilty on vacation. I feel guilty right now, talking to you, guilty that I'm not working."

He muses aloud about money. Yes, he wants it—for what it can buy, for what it signifies. He vowed he'd bank $25 million by the time he was 25—and he did—and now he's wondering what it would take to run his life, with a wad of perpetual pocket money, at the level he wants. With the private jets and cribs, the vacations and hotel suites for the crew. He's talking about Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire and owner of the Chelsea Football Club, whose yacht Drake believed cost $550 million.

"Do you know that even if I had $250 million in the bank, I couldn't buy half of that?" he says. (Turns out the yacht actually cost $1.5 billion.) "Rappers aren't the really rich ones. We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone's business to be super wealthy."

Like Diddy, Jay, or Dre. And Drake says he has advisers looking into that now, investments and the like, because $250 million is the stated goal by the time he's 29.

"I feel this great responsibility to see how far can we take it," he says, "how out of reach can I set that bar for whoever comes after. While I'm here, I'm gonna keep pushing that bar higher and higher up and make you really work for it."

When "Started from the Bottom" went viral, some of the inevitable snickering centered around the question: What "bottom" was Drake talking about exactly? After all, unlike Jay-Z, he hadn't sold crack growing up—or, like his mentor, Lil Wayne, done jail time. He grew up in a nice neighborhood in Toronto, the only son of a single mother. As a child actor playing a paraplegic on Degrassi: The Next Generation, he made $40,000 a year. A YouTube parody of the song, with 5 million hits of its own, includes the lines Started middle class in a wheelchair / On a crappy sitcom making good cash every year.

When asked about it, he nods. "I think a lot of people wish their favorite rapper wrote it—as if a song like that should be gangster—but I was the one who wrote it, and everyone has their bottom," he says. "The three biggest misconceptions about me are that I'm a cocky asshole because I'm a famous male rapper, that any part of me wants to be gangster or hood, and that I grew up rich."

Drake's life wasn't without its travails: His mother and father split when Drake was a young child. His father, a musician from Memphis, spent time in jail and drifted in and out of his son's life ("He's slick. He could sell water to a well"), while his mother, a teacher ("She's the godlike person in my life"), contended with growing health issues, including osteoporosis and debilitating joint pain, that eventually left her restricted to her room, where, Drake remembers, she "smoked cigarettes and took her pain meds, deteriorating every day, essentially dying." Though he grew up in the affluent Forest Hill section of Toronto, Drake says he and his mom rented the first floor and basement of a house. "We were more or less broke, but my mom didn't want us to live in an area that could create trouble for her son," he says. Meanwhile, as Drake grew older and eventually landed the Degrassi role, he became enamored of the good life.

"I needed a car and clothes. I wanted to go to the club, at least buy some drinks. And I wanted studio time." (He dropped out of high school, acted all day and rapped all night, sneaking into his Degrassi dressing room at dawn each day and sleeping there until the 10 a.m. call.) "I did ask my mother and uncle for a lot," he says, "but watching my mom go through her illness, and not being able to help, was very tough. And when I finally did make some real money, my mother got an operation on her spine that changed her life."

Meanwhile, there was a fractured relationship with his father, one that both father and son have recently tried to mend. "It's an emotional process," Drake says. "My father is an incredible man—charming, talented, and stylish—and I'm sort of living the dream he had for himself. But his actions served as that reverse role model for me. There are a lot of things that I don't ever want to do. I don't want to miss years of my child's life. I don't want to put a woman on a roller-coaster ride."

In one song off the new album, Drake delves into the pain of his parents' split, but as always for Drake, it's raw material—powerful, personal, and cautionary—reshaped as art. And it's what makes Drake Drake: his willingness to go there and say it out loud, and in that way possess it. If it's an impulse not wholly recognizable in rap, it suggests that perhaps Drake belongs on a slightly different continuum, one belonging, at least in spirit, to confessional poets or expressionist painters or indie bands like the xx, a band he loves. But, he says, his lodestar for the new work has been Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, the 1978 double-album confessional chronicling the collapse of Gaye's first marriage, described by one critic as "the sound of divorce...exposed in all its tender-nerve glory."

"It's so honest," says Drake, who's also been recording in Gaye's old studio, Marvin's Room. "He just puts it all out there.

"As for my whole story," he says, "I wouldn't change a thing. I've told bits and pieces of it—and I'll tell more. Maybe because I had friends who grew up in the hood, I could have acted like I had, too, and perpetrated a different lifestyle, and it would be eating away at me because it wouldn't be the truth. I'm actually here in front of you living the truth. I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It's not heavy. I don't have skeletons in the closet on their way out. This is my real age, my real name, my real past, and I'm good with that."

As he speaks, he gesticulates as if onstage, then adds:

"No—I'm grateful for that."

···

Drake leads me out through the living room, past the grand piano and bar, and up a few stairs to the Safari Room, where 40 joins us. There's a stuffed tiger, thick curtains that remain drawn against the sunlight, Oriental rugs on the floor, and a big hookah to blow on. The studio is some padded foam on the wall, a long table with big speakers, a few computers, a small soundboard, a leather couch and chair, and that's about it. No instruments in sight, no room for groupies. "We're four songs into the new album," says Drake.

Drake handles the words and melodies; 40 cooks the beats. "At this point, I can't have anybody but 40," Drake says. "Sometimes you'll hear me screaming halfway across the house—'40! 40!' It's the euphoric feeling of having completed something. I'm ready to do it now."

40 is nodding, with a wry smile. "I get called out of bed sometimes," he says. "We can do fifteen takes, and I swear, we almost always go back to the first one. That's the one in which the emotion and flow and original thought is captured."

Drake makes no apology for the fact that what he and 40 are trying to do is make hits—consumable, genre-bending tunes that will get played on the radio, pushed into the clubs, and thump at parties. Songs that will carry the tour, making for golden moments live. "You constantly ask yourself: Will I ever be able to excite people the way I did when the Internet was going crazy, back when you first felt like you had a piece of Drake that no one else had, and you wanted to share it with your friends? Is there an album or song we can make now that's good enough to get people that excited again?

"I ain't gonna lie: I want to be the one you listen to this summer," he says.

If in the past Drake had any reservations about playing bigger venues—about being able to energetically fill those venues while yearning for the days of mixtape intimacy—those doubts have been dashed now. "I fully accept I'm an arena-touring act," says Drake. "When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you. That's why on this album I've been trying to condense my thoughts to sixteen-bar verses. There's something to be said for spacing out the lines, to infiltrate people's minds."

It sounds like another rap: Spacing out the lines / to infiltrate people's minds. But it goes beyond infiltration: It's intimacy that Drake really craves: "I want you to leave with the feeling that I was talking to you the whole time. If I pointed to you, you're probably right, I did point to you. I probably was talking about your friend, you know?"

Drake and 40 swivel at the same time and start tapping the keys of their laptops, cuing up the first track off of Nothing Was the Same, a song called "Tuscan Leather"—a title, Drake tells me, named for a Tom Ford fragrance that some say smells like a brick of cocaine.

The truth is I have no idea what to expect. The paradox of Drake is that he's so multiple, he might write a love song sung by an Idol contestant ("Find Your Love") or something so raunchy you can't play it for kids ("Practice"). He could be rhyming about the kingdom of his material world, and then crooning about his spiritual state. He's a mama's boy who'll cut you up, though his tough-guy posturing seems occasionally halfhearted because, after all, he seems so kind of...decent.

Now comes the music, in a sudden blast, like green light through fog, the first notes strange and dissonant, in a lurching 3/4 beat. The intro hurtles and whiplashes, and a woman's voice, as if on helium, floats through the chaos, in the highest register, sorta funny and ghostly and beautiful. (It turns out to be a Whitney Houston sample.) The sound is an evocation of something that feels nostalgic and new, exuberant and menacing, at once. Which is when Drake's voice breaks through, rapping, pumped up, spitting nails. Both inside and outside the song itself, he keeps repeating, How much time's this nigga spending on the intro? How much time's this nigga spending on the intro? It feels like bedlam.

All the while, the real Drake sits with his eyes closed across the room, moving his lips, rapping to himself rapping. There's a verse, and then an as-yet-empty spot for a guest rap, and then Drake comes back under Whitney's helium voice. This time the words shift, as does the beat, becoming more sinuous and personal. Rising underneath the music, too, is a gentler keyboard riff, and by the time the third verse ends, the song rivers into a soft, ambient landscape that includes crowd noise and then, eventually, a voice—Curtis Mayfield's, at the end of a 1987 concert in Montreux—saying, "Having the same fears, shedding similar tears, and of course dying in so many years, it don't mean that we can't have a good life."

Then it outros on that beautiful repeating keyboard riff, and the Drake in the room, eyes still closed, scrunches his face, feeling every note. When it's over, he awakes from the spell. 40 remains hunched at the computer for a moment, letting the music settle into the silence. And then they both swivel in my direction again.

I've been dreading this moment, the ritualistic playing of the new album for the magazine writer. What if I don't like it? I'm not going to fake it. Both Drake and 40 are looking at me now, curious. I hold up my arm, and thankfully my arm doesn't lie: goose bumps. Drake's face breaks into a smile, and he says, "Ah, man, I didn't expect that—but for you to hear the emotion in it is amazing to me. This is my fucking moment to say if I wanted to rap all the time, really rap, I would, but I also love to make music. I'll do this for you right now. But it's for me, too. It's my story."

That's what the moment before the Moment is about, then, for Drake. "I'm thinking about this body of work—and asking myself: Where am I at in my life, how can I sum it up, and how can I make it relatable?"

They play three more songs, remarkable for the changing beats and moods within each, for the spare, moody spaces left open for the always surprising force of Drake's introspection. When the songs end, Drake opens his eyes again, returns from some place in his mind.

"I'm trying to get back to that kid in the basement," he says. "To say what he has to say. And I'm trying to make it last."

Michael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent and the author of The Telling Room, on sale July 30.

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